


Wonder

by JC_TheAuthor



Category: Alice In Wonderland - Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland - All Media Types, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Related Fandoms
Genre: Original take on characters
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-31
Updated: 2017-03-31
Packaged: 2018-10-13 10:44:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10512150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JC_TheAuthor/pseuds/JC_TheAuthor
Summary: Wonderland’s never been the sanest of settings, the sanest insane place at best.It’s never actually changed, but that’s the issue. Every generation is reborn into the same roles over and over, reliving the same story for all eternity, making for the most boring of history classes. Every generation, knowing their past lives. They know their own deaths and all the tragedies that happen under the rule of The Queen of Hearts. Every generation has accepted their fate. All the Wonderlanders accept that most will never live to see the coming of Alice; they accept that more still won’t survive until the pretty girl in blue will dethrone the beheader, and even more won’t survive to see what happens afterwards. The entire society just accepts that they’ll never do anything original, that they are powerless to change the fate of Wonderland. That is except for a rare few. The Memorials.Wonderland is different now. The newest generation of Memorials is madder than ever, mad enough to change history.





	1. Chapter 1

It has always happened the way same for me, for everyone. 

I live in a sweet wooden shack on the edge of a cliff, half of the building with nothing but crisp air below it. The foundation is weak, if there even is any. Sometimes the cracked floor boards get loose in the living room and tumble over into the crashing sea below. Then my mother calls out for my father and he replaces the board, before he sets up another support beam made from one of the mile high trees cut down from the forest nearby. Like clockwork, she’ll proceed to give him a kiss, and smile pleasantly until he leaves, before looking at a specific section of the living room floor, a section right next to the table and partially covered by the old red and yellow patchy rug, and then she’ll shiver. The smile she previously adorned will disappear. 

On October 22nd that section will break off while my mother stands on top of it. I’ll watch from the hall and scream my head off. My father will run in from the front yard where my brother is playing in the dirt, and he’ll dive into the living room to save her, but it won’t be enough. I’ll stand frozen and afraid, not knowing what to do as I watch my father grip onto my mother’s thin arm, his other hand grasping desperately at the table’s thick square leg, seeing the veins popping up under the skin on his neck and all over his arms as he tries to pull her up. He’ll be sweating from the strain it puts on him, emotionally and physically. He just can’t do it; the long, ugly rug is slipping through the hole, taking the table and my parents with it. My father will keep screaming ‘Come on!’, spitting as he keeps pulling but he can’t find his footing, the whole house is on an angle, sliding them into the jagged rocks below. My mother will be crying, holding onto him for dear life. In an instant, my father will slip, he will lose what feeble footing he had and both my beloved parents will fall down the hole. They’ll scream all the way down, the table going in afterwards and making the hole bigger, taking more of those wretched floorboards with it. You can hear it as their skulls shatter against the cliff, and exactly 10 seconds later the table will splinter against one of the up stretching stalagmites. 

I know it happens. Not because I see the future, but because I’ve lived it before. Reincarnation’s a bitch that way. Especially when it lets you keep all the memories. I know the exact moment, of the exact day, down to the exact second that my mother and father die, and I won’t do anything to stop it. They know it will happen too, my mother and father, as does my little brother who runs into the house just in time to see them go over. We all know. But mother will still wake up and sit on the couch, staring out the window at the sea. She’ll smile as she sips her tea, admiring the way the rising sun turns the water orange and golden, the spots closest to the day star looking thick and red. She knows she dies that day, today. 

Today is October 22nd. The only date I’ll ever remember. 

I wake up groggy and hungry, stomping heavily down the stairs wearing my grey pyjamas, rubbing my eyes. Everyone else has been up for two hours at least. Before I ever look at the calendar, I stand in the hallway and call over to my mother, who is sitting there calmly with her special tea cup, from her precious tea set.

“Mommy, where’s breakfast?” I ask, yawning terribly.

Mother tsks. “Close your mouth darling, I can see last night’s dinner. How does French toast sound?”

Those are her last words, the boards break. 

I’ve seen it, maybe 9000 times? I lost count after 200. Each time it gets worse. My mind can’t handle it. My parents aren’t the only ones to die either; I know when most everyone I have known…will ever know dies. Each time I go a little madder.

Then again, I guess that’s why they call me Mad Hatter.


	2. Chapter 2

“Get your filthy asses out of my beds! You’ve got cleaning to do!” 

That’s Ms. Drumilda, lady of the orphanage, a drum-bellied old hag with a crooked nose and yellowing teeth, as well as batons for hands, and no that’s not a lie. She pulls apart her dress shirt in the morning and bangs her “fists” against her stomach, beating the white surface to wake up all the naughty little children. She sounds like a marching band, and not the impressive kind. 

“I said get up! Do you little brats not have ears or something? Get up!”

It’s maybe 3:00am, all the children have school today but they have to do all of Drumilda’s work first. For the next two hours all 30 children have to sweep, mop and dust every nook and cranny of this three storey house using thin rags and hand soap. A few of them are in her office, getting all of Drumilda’s paperwork in order, making everything look fine and dandy for anyone who cares to look into Drumhilda’s House For Unwanted Children. A group is doing arts and crafts to replace the old drawings that have been hanging on the walls for years; they won’t get to draw again for a long, long time. Some are in the bathrooms, picking mould out of the cracks in the ceiling, scrubbing the mildew and scum off the toilets and showers. One or two are folding up the beddings and handing them off to the one’s doing laundry. The one’s doing dishes are trying not to cut themselves on rusty knives and broken spoons, and God forbid one of them drops a plate. The youngest are maybe five, the eldest maybe thirteen, the others anywhere in between. It doesn’t matter, not as long as all the work is done and the house is spotless all the time. 

The Mad Hatter sits in the basement, ignoring the drum. The orphanage isn’t very large, about the size of an average suburban household. The ground floor is reserved for Drumilda’s use, so the children’s beds are packed upstairs and in the basement. Only Drumilda’s favourites get to sleep on the top floor, ten of them that act like feudal lords, the worst being Lady. The rest get dank bunk beds in the damp basement. 

“Jade? What are you doing?” James asked.

The boy was genuinely concerned, but the Mad Hatter had heard the line too many times before to really care, she wasn’t supposed to respond anyway. Mad Hatter had taken to calling herself Jade, it’s the only liberty she gets, yet everyone still calls her Hatter, all except the Memorials. The Memorials always get to change their names, as compensation for forcing them to live the same lives again and again, for eternity. To watch all their loved ones die. 

James is her little brother, the White Rabbit, and it’s in this orphanage that he develops his obsession with time. “You can’t be late or your head’s on a plate.”

He’s a little different this time. The ears popping out from the top of his head are black, not white, he’s not furry all over, nor does James wear a waist coat. He wears black skinny jeans and a black shirt with tiny white buttons. Minor details to make Alice more comfortable, the little things society allows for, so that the new Alice does not faint every time an animal or object speaks to her. James keeps the piercing blue eyes though, blue like the sea below their home on a clear midday, blue like their mother’s eyes, when she lived. 

“Jade come on. Drumhilda’s going to kill you.” He says, sitting uneasily on the ladder attached to the top bunk next to Jade’s bed. 

James doesn’t want to be there. He wants to run upstairs and do the paperwork like Drumhilda asked but in order to live out the story he has to be down here to make his sister get out of bed. 

Today is the day Jade deviates. She breaks the story just this once because in the story that’s what she’s supposed to do. To break the story is to stop Alice from coming, and to stop Alice from coming is to doom Wonderland. That’s what the teachers teach, the same thing they’ve taught for thousands of lifetimes. Of course tiny deviations are fine, as long as they come to the same ending, but Memorials like Jade and James can’t deviate. Memorials interact directly with Alice; if they deviated, the story would change. Only the Hatter deviates and the Hatter only does it once, to always serve as an example of what happens to those who do. 

This time she’s knitting a scarf, white and green. 

“Jade please, you need to wash the walls outside.” James begged.

Jade looks up at James, her eyes bored, dead, blank, but she smiles anyway for his sake. They both know what’s supposed to happen next. 

“I’m making a scarf. Do you like it?” she asks, holding it up for James to see. “I snatched the wool from Drumhilda’s box. I really like the colours.”   
James smiles faintly for an instant before quickly replacing it with the nervous look he’s supposed to have.

“Jade please. She’ll find us.”

Jade sighs and puts the knitting needles down. “Jamjam we both know she’s going to find us. Then she’ll beat us blue, in front of all the other kids. Then all the ones who get to sleep upstairs will take whips and chains, and rocks-“

“You’re not supposed to say that!” James whispers frantically. 

It wasn’t his line; James was supposed to say “Hatter please? I don’t want to get hurt”, which Jade should’ve replied to with some witty remark about not fearing some tone deaf drummer in a nanny suit. Not this time though. 

“James this is the one day I get to deviate from the story. If I’m going to get ripped to pieces, I’m going to make it worth my time.” 

James steps off the ladder and ducks his head to sit in front of Jade on the white sheets. The springs creaked as he sunk into the single mattress. He bounces a little to get comfortable.

“Jade you can’t just change the rules, even if this is Deviation day.”

Jade laughs and picks up the needles again, the tip of her tongue touching her upper lip as she concentrated.

“Deviation day is the first day to mark the Coming of Alice, if I’ve remembered the history textbook properly.” Jade smiled.

James rolls his eyes. “Not like you need to. We’ve only lived it enough times.”

“You’re deviating James.” She smirked, the corner of her lip quirking enough to show a bit of one of her pearly white teeth.

James frowned and sat up straighter. “Well, I don’t care. If you’re going to break the rules, then I can too.”

“How daring of you.”

“I’m serious. I’m going to get beaten too, might as well have fun with it before she comes in.” James smiles nervously. 

Jade raises an eyebrow, looking over the needles at his pudgy little face. At eleven years old, James still has some of his baby fat, just enough in the cheeks to pinch. Jade knows he’ll lose it soon, starvation. Drumhilda already hates Jade, but after today the damned crone will have an excuse to torture the Hatter to no end, and use James as a weapon. The excuse is called destiny. 

It’s the fate of every living soul in Wonderland to live and proceed in life until the Queen of Hearts takes over and throws the land into ruin. It is the destiny of everyone in Wonderland to suffer tremendously, to watch what little they hold dear burn on a pyre of greed and pride. It is their destiny to do this over and over again simply so that they never have to face the unknown. Because the unknown brings happiness so near to your grasp, just close enough, before it rips it away and hurls it to someone else or throws it out completely. This is how they live; it’s their way of life, they don’t know any other way, and they’re too afraid to try. The whole society of Wonderland has been reincarnated so many times but it doesn’t matter how much death they see, they will only make advancements that favour Alice, Alice who changes with each Coming, Alice who very few will ever get to see. Wonderland lives for Alice.

“James, are you sure? Maybe this time Drumhilda will let you off easy…”

James shakes his head; they both know Drumhilda will never go easy with the beatings. She’ll give the same harsh treatment she always does, and she’ll enjoy it. Her drum of a gut will boom with laughter as she breaks the wooden spoons against their skin, as the whip leaves lashes and scars, and as the chains drag on the floor.   
Jade reaches her hand out to James. He pushes it away at first, though he wants the comfort, the tears are already brimming. Jade moves to sit next to him, taking her hat off and setting it aside, moving her knee length brown hair out of the way so that her shoulder is free. James takes it, burying his face in her neck, his whole body shaking as he cries. The tears fall like hard rain on Jade’s shoulder and she holds him tight, her rib cage getting smaller, her breath coming out ragged as she tries not to cry, as she tries to seem strong. Her chin rests gently on his head, one of her arms wrapped tightly around his waist, hugging him into her chest. Her other arm is around his shoulders, her hand on his head, running her finger soothingly through the black pool that is his hair, brushing it away from his face. Jade shushes him softly, telling him it’s alright, that they’ll be okay, they always make it out, that she’ll protect him like she always has. He’s afraid, and so is she. Any minute now the door will open and Drumhilda will walk in with a boiling cup of tea to splash on Jade’s skin. Jade can already feel the burning but it won’t hurt more than right now.  
Her chest is so tight from trying to keep in her tears. Her heart is pounding in her head, bouncing around in her cranium. 

Jade smiles, her eyes are red with tears. “Guess who I’m making the scarf for.” She says, wiping her nose and taking a shaky breath. 

“Who?” James asks, angry at himself. He’s gasping for air, wheezing slightly as the tears are drowning him, and he doesn’t want to be seen crying but he can’t make them stop. 

“For my favourite person ever.” 

“You’re mad! Who makes a scarf f-for someone they love?”

“I do.”

“S-since when?”

“Since today. Today slash last lifetime or the one before that, but I am making him a scarf.” Jade says, contemplating which tense to use. 

“Why?”

“Because when he and I get out of here it’s going to be cold on the streets. He’s so stubborn, but I don’t want him to freeze. So, I figured, if he receives this scarf as a gift then he can’t get rid of it. He’ll have to use it, otherwise it’s rude. He hates rudeness.”

“You’re talking about me.” James says, lifting his head, wiping his eyes. 

“No! What gave you that idea?” Jade says, smiling mischievously. 

“You are talking about me!” James shouts, smiling as well as he tries to grab for the scarf but Jade holds it out of his reach. 

“Hold on silly! It’s not finished! Stop, you’ll rip it. Jamjam!”

They giggle and laugh and chase each other around the room, sliding between bunks, climbing to the top and hopping dangerously from one bed to the other. Their eyes are still red but the tears have stopped, and that’s good enough. 

The shouting and laughing alerts Drumhilda and she storms into the room with her scolding tea in hand. Drumhilda comes into the children’s room to see James and Jade on opposite sides of a bunk bed, looking at each other with devious smiles through the little bars. They both look up and gasp, their smiles shattering as they scurry away from the bunk bed.   
It’s back to the scripted story. Jade and James try to run past Drumhilda to do their chores but Drumhilda pulls them back. The two of them go crashing into one of the bunks, James smacking his head on the metal frame holding up the top bunk. Drumhilda slams the door, detaining the two children. 

“What were you two doing?” Drumhilda screams loud enough for everyone in and around the building to hear, silencing them. “Well?”

Jade and James look at each other from the corner of their eyes, Drumhilda putting her cup down and clapping her sticks together to get their attention.   
“Answer me!” 

Neither of them answers her, though many smart remarks are reeling in the back of Jade’s mind. 

“You first then Hatter!” Drumhilda says, picking up her tea and carrying it carefully with both sticks, one through the handle while the other stops it from tipping over.

“We were only playing, Ms. Drumhilda.” James says, speaking quietly.

“What was that?” Drumhilda asks, leaning closer to hear him.

James cringes at the smell of her strong perfume. “We were playing,” he says a little louder.

Drumhilda steps back, giving James enough room to breathe while she purses her lips and paces back and forth in front of them, never going further than the length of the bed.   
“Playing? Is that right? Playing.” Drumhilda takes a sip of her steaming tea, speaking calmly. “Here’s what I think of you playing, in my house.”

Jade braces herself just in time to feel the boiling water hit her skin and she screams like a banshee. The water has hit her neck and all down her arm, causing her skin to go lobster red immediately. 

“You do not play in my house!” Drumhilda yells. “Get up! I said get up!”

Drumhilda grabs James by the bunny ears before he can reach over to help his sister and drags him upstairs. Jade follows behind slowly, tears slipping down her face and blurring her vision. Jade is hoping the tears will slip down to her neck and ease the burning. She’ll have blisters for weeks, she won’t be able to talk at all for a while, but she’ll make it through, she can’t die until her time comes anyway, no matter what Drumhilda does. 

“Deviants! We have deviants.” Drumhilda shouts triumphantly and the children come rushing to the ground floor from everywhere.

The children are all prepared, they knew this would happen and they are all too happy to take part in the fun. They came with bats, nails, hammers and guns. They wouldn’t do any permanent damage, just enough to make you scream very, very loudly. Even those who liked to play friends to James and Jade came in with nasty toys to use against them. Lady is leading at the front of the pack.

Deviants are shown no mercy in punishment, not even if they’re Memorials.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The basement is dark. All the children are in their assigned beds, sleeping, or at least pretending to sleep. Only two beds are empty, Jade and James are outside on the front porch. 

There’s a tiny window carved out at the highest point on the wall. The two of them push a bunk bed up against the wall, just below the window. They try to be as quiet as possible but the metal frame still scratches against the floor and breaks the silence with an impossibly loud noise. The bunk bed they use is the only one that isn’t filled. Only the top bunk is used by the March Hare, Kyle, he’s a Memorial. He’s a friend, an angry little fellow sometimes but a great friend. He had been locked up when the children got around to mercilessly attacking Jade and James. Drumhilda likes to do that to the children. She locks them in her box. 

Drumhilda’s box is a shack outside on the back lawn, pushed up against the pointless wooden fence. Its inside is endless. It has enough space to hold the children and for Drumhilda to be able to do whatever she wants. She creates little hells for the kids when she shoves them in there. One never came out; the rumour was he was eaten by whatever Drumhilda set on him, but Jade knew the truth. The Hatter had unlocked the door and let the drooling mess of a child go free, no one caught her, or so she thought.

The tiny window is propped open with a history book so that the two siblings could climb through, wiggling their bodies through the small opening. They sit on the porch with glasses in their hands, the nice ones from the china cabinet. The glasses are filled with water, water from the stream miles away. The water glows in shades of green, blue and purple during the night. They giggle as the water makes their lips change colour when they drink. 

“Find the hat.” Jade said, smiling brightly, looking up at the stars, her greens eyes sparkling. 

James turns to Jade and flicks the top hat off her head, the scruffy old thing toppling onto the floor. 

“No not that one dingus.” Jade pouts and picks up her hat with her unbroken arm, setting it on her lap and dusting it off. “In the sky, the stars. Connect the dots.” 

“Connect the dots?” 

“It’s a sort of game. One of the last Alices taught it to me.”

“Alice isn’t supposed to teach things.”

“Alice doesn’t follow the same rules. Find the hat in the stars.”

James looked up, staring absentmindedly at the trillions of stars. There are barely any spaces between them. 

“There,” James says, pointing to a swirling section of endless blue, the crazy patterns contained in what looked like a box. 

“Yes!” Jade clapped. “Exactly. Good, good.”

James laughs quietly and smiles at his sister. She’s still staring up at the sky, looking for imaginary shapes that only she could actually see. Only someone who had spent as much time with her as he had would be able to figure out what she saw. Jade saw incredible things, impossible things. Madness made light in dark alleys for Jade, it shows her what the other side of the moon looked like, how to create scarier monsters out of the ones already made.   
It surprised James how she could still be so happy. Jade’s forearm was cracked, put in a sling stained with her own blood, wrapped up poorly. Her arm will be fine; it heals with few complications but the scars stay, and she’ll start wearing much longer sleeves. Her head is bandaged loosely, the white wrappings hanging low and useless, just to hide the nasty gash a frying pan left behind. Her left eye is bruised badly, her neck covered in blisters and her skin is peeling off in sheets. She’s got a broken rib that forces her to take short breaths but that’ll be taken care off in no time. She sits up completely straight so that the deep cuts in her back don’t come to close to her shirt and sting.   
It’s been days, weeks, maybe even months since Deviation day. James has been patching his sister up every other day. It helps that Jade can’t die. As a Memorial, law has it that she cannot be killed or wounded beyond repair until the years after the Coming of Alice. Memorials cannot stray from Wonderland’s script, therefore should a deviant kill a Memorial before the point in which said Memorial is meant to die, the deviant must be hanged. 

James always thought laws were funny. The wording is always so tricky, there’s always a hole.  
But it’s not just the laws that keep Jade alive. Wonderlanders can survive a lot of torture, it’s in their genes. In a land filled with magic and mystical things, there are few things that can’t happen and very few sensible things that can happen. A Wonderlander could live forever or live happily ever after, if not for the laws that tell them to die too soon. 

“Let’s run away.” Jade says, turning to James, her one good eye sparkling with delight in her idea. 

James is taken back by the statement. It is something she’s supposed to say; it’s part of their endless story, but she’s said it early. This night as they sit, staring at the stars, James is supposed to find a pocket watch in a box of their parent’s old things. Kyle is stealing their parent’s box as they speak, sneaking into Drunhilda’s punishment shack in the backyard to get it for them. 

James doesn’t know what to say; he doesn’t have a line to speak. There are no words that come to mind.

“James? What do you think?” Jade continues, saying the exact lines she shouldn’t be saying right now. 

Jade’s smiling; her head cock sideways so that the bandages flop to the side, swinging in the breeze as they hang off her head. The only reason the bandages stay on is because they’re stuck like glue to her skin from the dried blood. Jade knows what she is doing, rattling James’ mind. She’s given him options, to either think for himself, to come up with new lines, or to repeat the ones he already knows, but out of order. 

“I…” James starts, unsure of how to continue, looking around nervously, like Lady will come and rat them out for deviating. 

“Kyle’s going to be late.” Jade says, putting her hat on and adjusting it so that it’s at an angle, just slightly askew. “I put a few extra obstacles so that it will take him longer to get into the box.”

“You what-“

“Don’t worry, he’ll still get in. You’ll get daddy’s watch. I’ll get mommy’s ribbon. Let’s run away.” 

“We-“

“Can’t?” Jade finished his sentence, raising her eyebrow, giggling quietly. “Of course we can. We’ve done it before. Just jump the fence, pack a bag, lock the pitbulls in the dog house, slip a little something into old Drummy’s tea, and make sure Lady sees it all.” 

“Well yeah, but Jade-“

“We’ll get caught for deviating.” Jade gasped, using magic to imitate James’ voice in an effort to tease him, mocking his nervousness.

James growled and pushed Jade’s shoulder, nearly knocking her out of her chair.

“Ow!” Jade cried, still impersonating James, tears welling up in her eyes. “But I’m injured.” 

“That’s what you get for using magic to tease me.” James said, crossing his arms. 

Jade laughed and sat up straight again. “You’re deviating.” 

“You started it.” James complained. He didn’t mind so much now that he knew no one was watching. They wouldn’t get caught. 

“Run away with me little brother. Let’s do something different.” Jade pleaded, putting her hand on his shoulder. “You hate it here. They’ve got beatings prepared around the clock for us, they torture us James. They do it for fun, for things like finishing supper a second late. Jamjam please.” 

James looks down at his hands, the tips of his fingers cracked from washing so many dishes, the skin so dry that it’s nearly sandpaper. He smiles faintly at the nickname she uses but it doesn’t sway him.

“We’d be on be run, fugitives. They’d catch us, hang us.”

“Hanging doesn’t kill us, you know that. Only beheadings do, or bullets.” Jade says, sighing as she turns away to face the stars again.   
Jade takes a deep breath and winces, feeling the broken rib poke against her insides. It’ll heal soon, when day comes, but that knowledge doesn’t stop it from hurting. She distracts herself by looking up at the night sky; she likes the patterns she sees, they fascinate her, these dead things hanging above her. An Alice once told her that all the stars are dead, that they die long before the light reaches Wonderland. Millions, billions, trillions of dead stars, their light still lasting centuries after they’re gone. 

“Jamjam, why can’t we leave?” she asks, her voice coming out as her own, soft and sad and tired.

“Because we’re Wonderlanders.” He answers. “We are bound by rules.”

Jade rolls her eyes and her head lolls to the side, looking at James with a sobering stare. “Bullshit.” 

Just then Kyle arrived, perplexed by how long it took him to retrieve the small wooden case that held personal effects. Kyle proceeded as expected though, with the same enthusiasm as always, maybe even more so, just to sell it, to make it seem real.

“Jade, Jamie, look what I’ve found.” Kyle grins, whispering across the porch to them, his face alight. 

James forgets all about the conversation he and Jade were just having, pushing it out of his mind for the moment. He looks over at Kyle with a faintly interested look.  
“Well come here and show us.” James says, beckoning Kyle forward. 

Kyle, or the March Hare, is an eccentric little fellow with his shoulder length, bright, turquoise hair and bright pink eyes. He’s thin and girlish, and he bounces around with such joy that’s unimaginable to the other Memorials. It’s one of the reasons he and the Hatter will proceed to get along so well; Kyle will become a cocky genius but he’ll never lose his good attitude. 

Kyle hops over the bannister of the porch and skips over to them. He plops the bronze coloured trinket box in James’ lap and sits on the edge of Jade’s chair. The old beach chairs they’re sitting in are painted white, the colour sloppily thrown on. The porch under them creaks and groans, and nobody notices but the sound makes Jade nervous, like she’ll fall through. The stars are still shining bright, bathing the whole scene in twinkling light that comes and goes like clouds while everything else seems dull, dark and distant.   
James pops open the box. He doesn’t bother struggling with it like he usually does. Instead James jiggles the lid of the box until it comes free of its warped base. Kyle looks down at Jade, his head tilted, silently asking why James is acting different but Jade is just smiling into the box. 

Jade always loved this part. 

James gingerly holds the chain of their father’s pocket watch between his fingers, an expression somewhere between sadness and pride adorning his features, his mind immersed in nostalgia. Like all lifetimes their father used to kneel before his kids in the afternoon before lunch and hold up the watch. He’d give them a task, any task.

“Wash your hands in twelve seconds,” He would say, or “Make your mother a bouquet in two minutes.”

It was a game they played, and sometimes when they went into town they’d play it too. They’d get tasks like pet 15 dogs in the pet shop, and not the bipedal ones, or fill the grocery basket in ten minutes. If you couldn’t do the task before time on the pocket watch ran out, you lost. James always won. The watch is still in perfect condition, the glass unbroken and clear, the gold still glistening, only covered in a thin layer of dust.   
There are more things in the box of course. A long, thick golden ribbon once used for a white dress their mother would wear, a raven feathered pen stained with black ink all over, a deck of playing cards only marginally frayed, a few cuff buttons, a wilted white rose, and a letter so old it turned yellow. Jade read the letter so often in previous lifetimes the she could recite it by heart. It was a letter written by her mother to a paperboy, asking him to stop throwing the paper into the garden and crushing her roses or else the next time she’d cut of his feet, or worse, marry him. It always made Jade laugh to think how her mother thought marrying the fool would’ve been worse than maiming him; what had her mother planned to do?

Jade reaches over, forgetting about her broken arm and gasps before sitting back in her chair, her eyes firmly shut against the pain.

“Are you okay?” Kyle asks, hopping off the chair’s arm to give Jade more room, genuine concern in his voice.

“I’m fine.” Jade says through gritted teeth. “I’m going to kill that rank Lady. She broke my arm!”

“She’ll break your other one if you keep talking like that.” Kyle says, looking up at the top floor instinctively. 

“She’ll do it anyway when she becomes queen.” Jade growled.

“No she won’t. It’s not part of the story.” James says almost defensively. 

“Damn the story!” Jade yells out before her voice drops to a murmur. “I’d rather burn the pages. Let's run away.”


End file.
